


Shot Moderation

by frooit



Category: Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)
Genre: Foreplay, Knife Play, Light Bondage, M/M, bad language, coming on strong, tease, ultimate ust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-05
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-20 08:19:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/583230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frooit/pseuds/frooit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sands clears his throat, swallows a thousand times, and says, "Playing hard to get?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shot Moderation

Sands enters the world face down on a sheetless mattress, arms twisted back around his head to cross at the wrists, pressed tight with a smooth, stiff moving something. Leathery, yet not leathery. The bed, mattress, rectangular pad, smells like a mixed drink of sweat, sex, and bad tequila.

The place _feels_ open, like there's a window or a door open somewhere. Night air slicing in, crickets chirping, echoed waving of curtains and dead space.

The first thing he does isn't exactly move, or even try. His head's a haze and maze of pinholed-grit hangover. He lies breathing. Not on fire, not sore, not panicked-- _freezing_. Knee-high shorts in Mexico's sun-down anyway. A worn-and-worn-again t-shirt, a wristwatch razoring skin open, silver ring boring wedges into knuckles.

"Fuck..." Now struggling, now fighting and breathing in more sex and sweat.

He curls his fingers in towards the palm. Nails long, edged in and digging deeper. He doesn't bite them, he's got smoking and drinking as bad habits to fall back on. You never know what Mexico might leave under your nails, anyway. _Who's blood is this? Who's blood is that?_ Conditioning is remembering to wash them after every dive, lick, scratch and burn.

_Just perfect. Peachy. Instant bad situation._

He gives in and lies still again. Cold sweat, calm nausea, slicing air. And like he's hit a crossroads and the seas have parted suddenly, he can hear breathing. _Suddenly_. Not your heavy dust-storm wheeze--calm, even, fucking _ominous_ breathing, right there on the edges of his world. The jagged coal-black edges and valleys.

He rolls his head, wrenching his neck, and says, "Un- _god-damn_ -tie me." Voice like it's been dragged through town and into every ditch along the way.

There's not much of anything at first. A gust of wind maybe, a creak in the walls, in the floors, another inhale. Nothing until, "You've been out three hours."

Spear of light through darkness, parts in the mist, a picture, absolution.

Sands grinds his teeth down hard, narrowly missing his tongue and the inside of a cheek. "Oh. _You_." He can taste the residual nicotine branded there in his mouth and the bile mounting to immediately wash it out.

 

 

Can you even offend legends? Do they have your regular, run-of-the-mill emotions? A sense of humour? Sands squabbles his fingers, assuming the _Legend's_ close enough to see. Close enough to be just _that_ aggravating and faceless and out of reach.

"Untie me."

El doesn't.

When you're blind, you're thinking a lot about things. Let's reflect. Your head has this frozen-in-time constant, like you've got hours and days and years to think about whatever it is you think about. You're floating on glacial ice and have this kind of time.

So. Take El.

Sands isn't going to say he's had a crush (the legend, the coat, the guitar) on him ever since first butting heads (indifference, challenge, possibility). That's rolling over into schoolgirl country. He'd much rather lump it under morbid curiosity, or lust, or _fucking Mexico_ , and drown classification. Roast whatever part of his brain thought manipulating fire was a good idea.

Imagine _Caution_ elbowing its way to the front line because whatever you had there before was gouged and twisted out of your skull. Literally, folks. Nobody's the wiser because those iced-asphalt sunglasses hide your nasty, hollow secret. Your poster child for _how to get fucked up and over in foreign lands_. The three-step programme: easy as uno, dos, trez. Sign up today and get two pesos off. 

 

 

He feels he's owed the moment when he says, "You know the saying, 'fucked blind'?"

El animates, moving on footfalls to become a sharp sink in the mattress. "'Silence is golden'?"

"Fuck you."

"I found you in a bar. Not a good one." Of all the things, in all the wide, wide, stupid fucking world. El sounds _amused_.

Sands sets his jaw hard enough to warp his hearing.

"You were face-down on a table." Amusement intact, but there's a pause. Long enough to let a car speed by, the curtains to curl and wave, and Sands to figure out that El's padding the drama. Once a mariachi showman, always a mariachi showman, you know.

"So," El continues, voice like smoke twisting and fading, "I brought you here." A less than warm hand with cool fingers appears, finding a finger or two under the binding around Sands' wrists. "And tied you up."

"That's swell, El. Do you have a kink, or are you just afraid of me?" This isn't panic, it's confusion. It's survival. That's what it is. CIA mind games.

"I'm not afraid of you."

"Then un-fucking-tie me, m'kay. I'm chafing." He wiggles his fingers again and El ignores them again. A grain-smooth palm rides, it fucking _rides_ , the underside of his arm, and everything goes hot. Cold to hot. To steam hot. To humid hot. To heat hot. _Hot_.

"Not yet."

Sands' entire jaw, all the way up to his sinuses, feels numb, teeth snapped tight and throbbing in their gums. El's hand butterflies out over the back of his neck, always hot, always kneading, now reaching--he immediately has to breathe, and does, cracking his mouth open. It's more of a gasp than anything at all. Dying man's last breath.

El's hand disappears, and the tilt in the mattress smoothes out.

A chilly gust whistles over.

"What the fuck," Sands hisses, "what the _fuck_. Did I just hallucinate that hole sexual encounter? You're going to turn tail and run now?" He swallows, copper and bile going all the way down to gather poison in his gut. He's flushed when he stops to realizes it. Hangover not making function the most appealing.

"Where are you?" He rolls onto his back and pushes himself up. All too soon maybe, because his head explodes, splits open into fire and lightning, sucking the air clean out of his lungs. Bile rises to stick like a chicken bone in his throat. Bloomed acid burn.

El is human breath and human hands then. Is a deeper shadow in a shadow world.

Sands clears his throat, swallows a thousand times, and says, "Playing hard to get?"

"Maybe that's it."

"Charming. The mariachi with baggage."

So Sands' world tilts easily now a' days, and his arms bend and fold funnily when El crushes him back into the mattress. Rusted springs whine, dust leaps up and chokes the air; wrists and fingers gone to pins and needles.

"Fucker," Sands groans when he gets the chance, "you're breaking my arms."

El mutters something unfriendly in Spanish and leans back to reach into the mouth of his boot. Nails scrape hard into Sands' sides on their way down, turning up raw, hot lines. El comes back up with something like a pocketknife. Cool-edged blade meandering along the calf of Sands' leg, the palm of a hand, over the small of back. Dormant threat. It hesitates at the crossroads of his arms.

"No attempted killing?" El asks.

"I promise nothing," Sands mutters.

"Fair enough."

El snaps his wrist back dramatically, cutting the cord, or leather, or bandana, or whatever it is.

"That's more like it."

Sands unwinds the snagged parts, hangover twitching and boiling under the surface of his skin. He brings a wrist up to his mouth, laving a tongue over what he knows are bruise marks already. He's not just aware of El's eyes, it's a twist in his gut. Leaping fire.

Grip like molten stone and sinew guitar strings, El takes that wrist. He rolls the bone and joints hard enough together to make a good noise. A _grind_. The reply is a long hiss, bared white teeth, and Sands reaching out, like a real damn blind man, to slam into the hand still holding the pocketknife. He folds cool, spidery fingers over El's fist and puts that to his mouth. Breathing open-mouthed, probably fogging the blade.

El doesn't twitch away as Sands' tongue coils round a knuckle and the root of a finger. El doesn't open his mouth and speak as the tongue strays off skin and hits metal. He doesn't even breathe or blink as it rides the blade-side to the very end and back. Slick, wet, gleaming this side of silver.

Sands smiles, and his teeth are bright red even in the half-light.

 

 

Sands has a mouth like storybook foxes (sly, conniving, genius) and a tongue completely inhuman (completely). El pulls the knife, with the one sharp tooth, back, and swipes it across the mattress. It leaves a red mark. Livid. Alive. He throws the knife at the nearest wall. It twangs and sticks.

Who cares about subtleties at this point? Who's keeping score? Who's digging fingers like anchors into the back of Sands' head? Who's not just an outline of fire but the whole damn mountain volcano? Mexico's blazing sun, closer every evening.

He's breathing him in, that's what El's doing. And Sands' tongue is there, hanging over the teeth of his lower jaw, gathering blood, lining the smirk. Smooth red, red, red. El regards that, adjusts his fingers deeper into Sands' skull, and tastes. The first ten seconds of mouth to mouth is Hell's eternal ash and flame and Heaven's promised heat and ease, colliding. Tongue and lip and tooth. It actually _burns_ , and Sands has to pull out. Abort.

"Whoa." Throaty, gutted wheeze, licking of lips. Red, red, red.

El's a something that spreads from the inside out. Heat. Liquid gold. Sands' fingers tingle where they're twisted into El's shirt. He can taste his own blood. He can taste El, and dust, and air, and sweat. The world. He can really feel that headache now. It's got roots and it's digging into the base of his skull, scoring nerves as it goes. Kindling.

"I need a cigarette." 

 

 

As a man, Sands knows cock. It's just the part where you realize it really is attached to someone else that's distracting. Distracting in the five second, _I could almost care_ , moment, then it's piss in the wind because you're too busy trying to wrap yourself around an authentic mariachi. _Wrap_ , as in legs and arms. Straddle, really.

"You have cold hands." El says, and to emphasize that somehow he puts his face right up to Sands' throat. As if the whole package wasn't enough, his moist breath has to be there. Distracting. Sucking in, blowing out, moist, and getting moister.

"Hm." Sands embeds his fingers into El's shoulder to get his displeasure across. "Christ, but you _are_ a woman, El. Whine, bitch, whine. Don't tell me you want to take it slow?"

"No." El bites. As in _Sands' throat_. Actual full-toothed gnaw. Flash-flood images of animals with their throats ripped out and blood as dark as oil staining the land come to mind.

"Ow." Teeth exchange for lips, lips for teeth, and Sands' mouth hangs on its hinges, stuck between protest and nothing coherent.

"Okay, okay. Take that back, don't stop. You stop, I get angry. Very, very--"

"Shh." El hisses.

"You know, uhh, fuck whoever said patience was a virtue."


End file.
